Re: Re: Objective-C 2.0

[Nicolas Roard]

On 8/20/06, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
> The APSL is a Free Software License [1] according to the FSF. It is
> incompatible with the GNU GPL, but it is Free Software. It can be
> distributed and used by anyone, anywhere. Being Free Software, it can
> be included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, and anything else you
> can thing of. The only reason that the GNU objc runtime still exists
> is because the few people involved either don't like it for personal
> reasons (I worked hard on this!) or political reasons (Its maintained
> by a company that [*gasp*] sells software!).

As far as I know, the reasons are mostly historicals -- NeXT didn't
release their runtime, hence the need for GNU to rewrite one. Since
then, there's also some partical differences (api differences, some
parts of the GNU runtime are a bit faster than the NeXT one, and
vice-versa). I'm unsure about the current licensing of the apple
runtime, although if it's APSL it's a problem -- if it's APSL2 it's
better (but even so, I think debian has problems with that licence --
see Squeak...).

Anyway the problem for people outside the apple platform is that 1)
indeed it will likely take time to implement the new features in the
GNU runtime 2) existing software can have problems running with the
apple runtime (I know that GNUstep didn't last time I tried, although
I think it probably would not be that much work to make it work again,
but well..).

In my opinion it's a shame to have both runtime, as in a way it's a
stupid duplication of efforts; but on the other hand APSL2 is not good
enough even if it's a free software license, considering that GNU
think it's incompatible with the GPL. Apple could release it under the
BSD licence, or dual-licence it; but somehow I have some doubts
they'll do that.

Anybody with more insight about those problems please come forward --
I'd love more informations/positions..

Specifically -- what would be the needed steps for having only one
runtime, acceptable for all the parties -- note that it would also be
of interest (imho) for Apple to have ObjC be considered a more
portable/not tied to one platform language...

--
Nicolas Roard